Ever since OC Pop Quiz and the OC Weekly teamed up to host a trivia competition in which the Lagalots failed miserably back in early October, we haven’t been to a regular Wednesday trivia night at @BackstreetBrew. It’s not like we were ashamed to show our loser faces, we just got really distracted by life. But last Wednesday, we decided to have a night out with some fun trivia on the side.

I checked Groupon and there was a deal that I quickly bought. It was $22.00 for 4 pints of beer and 4 flights. A great bargain in itself but Groupon let me use a coupon code that gave me $5.00 off so in the end, I got my deal for $17.00. It was worth downloading the Groupon app and kept me in beers the whole night.

The Old Man and I started with our flights.

I got a sampling of the lighter lagers and ales with my heaviest being a 5.9% called Trifecta Pale Ale. Sean got some of the stronger ones and his favorite was the Holy Shizz Imperial Red, it’s a 12% or something close to that. An interesting and tasty beer I tried was the Mango & Habanero. It was so sweet at first and kinda pulpy when you held it up to the light. It went down smooth. And then the habanero kicked in and my throat burned like a mother fucker. Sweet and spicy is a great combination.

For our second round of flights, we both just got our favorites from the menu and shared each one. When it came time for us to get our pints, I went with a Set Sail IPA and so did the Old Man. We weren’t even finished with those before we were ordering our last round of pints. We were a little tipsy so we stuck with a 5% Vienna Lager to close the night out and the brewery down.

There were six teams competing that night and it was only the second time that Leonardine Industries has played. The usual suspects were there, like Quiz On My Face, but there were some new faces & team names too. Quizmaster Doug was already there when we arrived so we knew it was gonna be a fun and fast evening.

In the first round, Leonardine did okay. We knew that Sturgeon is prized for caviar and that Papa Johns is the official sponsor of the Super Bowl and that the first animal

in space was a dog but we didn’t know who Quasimodo fell in love with (Esmerelda, btw) or that the latin root of Malaria is “bad air.” We ended up getting 4 points out of six and we got the bonus wrong. It was about the Super Bowl attendance and we guessed 120,000 because we don’t know anything about the capacity of stadiums. But Team Ramrod knew and when they rolled the die, they got to steal a point from another team. Luckily they didn’t choose us and we came in tied for second place.

Round 2 was hard. It wasn’t about balls so we had that in our favor. The task was to name 10 musicians/bands that toured in 2015 and made more than 50 million or something like that. The only thing we could think of to do was to name all the artists that we hear about all the damn time on TMZ. That turned out to be a pretty good strategy because we got seven points for a total of 11 and the lead. Thanks Harvey Levin. Yeah, yeah…I know you’re a lawyer.

The next round was worth a total of 9 points. We got the first three right, which was the top tourist states in the US. In a way that was too easy, we guessed California, New York and Florida and they were all correct. The next three were so fucking difficult that I don’t even think that the fully assembled Lagalots could’ve known the answers. We had to name 3 of the 6 musicians who had won an Oscar and also had a Billboard hit. Wow. Who the fuck knows that kind of information? Certainly not us as we guessed wrong on all three. The last question was to name 3 styles of iPod besides Touch and Mini. Sean knew the Shuffle and the Nano but we couldn’t think of a third so we only got 2 right. We got the bonus question wrong by the smallest fraction. I thought the iPod came out in 2002 but it turned out to be 2001. Two teams got it right and got to roll the die. But the good news for us was that we were still in the lead with 16 points.

The picture round, the 4th one, was next and we had to name ten fruits with shitty ass quality pictures as the only way to identify them. We did well, and I was really proud of myself for knowing the Dragon Fruit because I had just made a dragon fruit and pineapple sorbet the day before. We didn’t know acai, we got figs and dates mixed up, and Sean had never even heard of a lychee. We got seven out of ten and we were feeling pretty confident. But we lost our lead and Quiz On My Face took the reigns.

Round 5…the Guess Who round. We have a rule that I’ve stated before and I will state again now. No matter how sure you think you are, don’t turn in the answer until after the 3rd clue. That way, you’re sure and you get points instead of none at all. So I know that rule but I like to break rules, i’m just that way. I knew the answer was Gwen Stefani on the second clue. So did everyone else. One team turned in their answer after the first clue and 2 other teams besides us turned in after the second one. You don’t ask a question in Anaheim about Gwen Stefani and expect no one to know the answer.

Round 6 was the final one. It’s just like round 1. Six questions and a bonus. Well we’re pretty damn good at these easy trivia questions by now so we got 5 correct. We knew that James Earl Jones provided the voice for Mustafa (except the Old Man had to ask me who Mustafa was) and that crochet is like knitting but with one hook and that giant, one-eyed creatures are called Cyclops. And thanks to the power of the eraser, we figured out how to spell “subpoena” after a few trial and errors. The question we got wrong was in regard to the host of a foodie show on the Travel Channel. I thought I knew the answer, Andrew Zimmern, but I was sadly mistaken. We also got the bonus wrong again. It was about the weight of the heaviest burger ever made and we guessed 3 pounds but it was actually something like 14 pounds. Crazy ass meat-eaters.

When the final results were announced, we had a score of 34 and we were in third place. Quiz On My Face and Ramrod tied for first so there was a quiz off! In 50 seconds, the teams had to name as many Las Vegas Strip hotels as they could. The winner, with 13 named, was Quiz On My Face. Congrats to them and to a battle hard fought. We found out later that night that it was Quiz’s first time winning and they have been doing trivia night longer than we have. So extra congratulations go out to those boys.